This is an old question, but I hope this answer is helpful to someone.
There is a new feature in HTML5, window.postMessage, which allows for communication between an iframe and the hosting window. There's some good documentation here.
As usual, you can expect some inconsistencies across browsers: in my experience, Firefox accepts any object as the message, but IE will only accept a string.
There have been some developments to make this feature easy to use in different browsers, including polyfills to make it work in older browsers.
The one that I ended up using was Ben Alman's jquery plugin.
Enjoy!